> Twenty years ago the self-appointed more-intelligent-ones told me I'd freeze to death.
Can you provide a citation on this? I hear it everywhere (except it's usually 30 years ago), but I don't actually remember it from back then.
I do remember the bit about nuclear winter, but no broad consensus that another ice age was imminent, like we've had about global warming for a good while now.
> Given that the Earth's rotation is slowing down, isn't it immediately apparent that the liquid core must spin faster than the outside. It's just basic fluid dynamics. If apply a torque to the outside of a fluid filled region, the middle of that region will feel the effect last.
At noon let's all face west and run five miles real fast, to see if we can get the shell back up to speed.
> Anyway, the obvious answer is that you should have a chance to decide whether or not it's a false alarm. In Japan, you probably left your door unlocked and it's just your neighbor moving your laundry out of the rain.
> With no real training in hardware, software programmers really don't know what they are doing, or how to fix something if it goes BOOM.
That's a curious sentiment. If you want expertise in hardware you should be in EE rather than CS. If you only want to understand enough about hardware to understand how your programs are executed, you should get that in a CS program. In fact, that's one of the complaints most often heard from CS students: "Why do I have to take this class when I just want to be a programmer?"
Or if you're talking about learning when and how to change out a power supply, you shouldn't go to college to learn that at all.
And forgive me for lecturing, but any field has some foundations you must digest before you get to the pay-off. It happens that you made the worst of options: went through the most boring part of the apprenticeship and then quit just before you were let in on the tradesman's secrets. I worked through the first two years of a degree in chemistry, and though I learned some things that affect my understanding of how the universe works, I didn't get jack shit as preparation for a career.
> Once I asked him what they did with newly-minted Ph.D.s in CS. He said, "Retrain them." I was surprised by this, and so I asked him if he thought all those years of CS education were essentially useless. "Oh, no," he said. "They're worth their weight in gold. They'd spent years working through extremely abstruse problems, and they'd learned how to absorb massive amounts of information quickly. Basically, they knew how to learn anything. Those guys would know nothing about building actual, production-level software for delivery to a customer. But they'd learn that quickly, because the foundation was strong."
The problem (if it is a problem) with freshly minted PhDs is that as you advance through a graduate program (in any field) you focus on narrower and narrower subject matter as you go, until by the time you write your dissertation you're the world's foremost authority on something so narrow that most people will think your the foremost authority on "nothing".
You also become so familiar with abstruse concepts and the abstruse jargon that they are discussed in, that you may not speak the same language as ordinary people, or even experts in other sub-fields of your discipline.
> I think you'll find the business attitudes of people like Carly Fiorina et al, the dot com boom and bust, and the overhyping of nanotechnology probably had a lot more to do with it. Research needs cash and after the tech crash, 9/11 or any other tipping point existed for the economy, I think you'd find that research just wasn't a dead cert anymore and people pulled out their cash in droves.
I think the will to fund deep R&D faltered long before then. Even the feds aren't interesting in funding much of anything without short term military applications any more.
Sadly, most of our scientists who would have been doing deep R&D thirty years ago now spend all their time writing grant applications so they can maintain a trickle of cash to keep their grad students productive.
> Science and research in teh US is more closely linked to the economy than religion.
It's linked to both, and to a lot of other things as well, but it's hard to deny that Bush's ban on stem cell research and adovcacy for ID is anything other than appeasement for the religious conservatives who helped put him in office.
The castration of environmental science, OTOH, is obviously appeasement for a different group that also helped put him in office.
> As far as evolution versus creationism goes, I've never seen any reason why they can't go hand in hand, although I fail to see how you can take either literally unless you were there...
That's a lame excuse for evolution denial. Or do you think it's never possible to figure out what happened if you didn't see it? If you are home alone with your dog and you hear a lamp fall over behind you and see the dog bolt past you from behind, do you find yourself wishing you had seen it fall so you'd know whether the dog did it?
The arguments "no one was there", "maybe God made the fossils to fool people", and "you can never know anything for sure" are the surest signs that creationism has exhausted every last possibility to provide a theory consistent with the evidence, so that its proponents must now fall back on nihilism, omphalism, and bad theology to support their views.
> There is not consensus on the theory of evolution
I feel confident in calling it a consensus, even though a very tiny number of scientists choose to teach evolution denial to religious audiences. (And even the vast majority of that tiny community don't have credentials in any relevant field - so much so that their followers have developed nasty habits of misrepresenting their credentials.)
> certainly not on the way it is often taught in public schools. No one has demonstrated an ameoba mutating into a human being, infact, nobody has demonstrated anything else mutating into a homo sapiens.
Your ignorance of the evidence for evolution isn't evidence against evolution.
> It seems disingenuous for you to attack ID for being non-falsifiable when to "prove" Evolution you'd need to witness things on an immeasurably long scale of time such that it is "non provable".
So, are you a relativity denier as well?
At least Einstein's theories had testable consequences. ID has no goal other than to "prove" that Someone tinkered with biology somewhere along the way. They aren't interested in any consequences other than the theological; they go out of their way to make excuses for not following up on the implications of their claims.
> The claim of ID proponents is that an intelligent, omniscient designer having a hand/influence in the arrangement of matter to generate life is the most likely of the presented theories.
And they offer nothing to support that view other than logical fallacies applied to misrepresentations of evolution.
Ever wonder why the only way they can get published in a peer reviewed biological journal is to cheat?
> I, for instance, find that much more likely than NaCL turning into protozoa.
And what, precisely, do your intuitions about how the universe works count for? Science has been turning up counterintuitive results since the time of Copernicus.
> You'd suggest that ID is non-falsifiable because you cant conduct experiments to test it. Sure you can. Wait for the divine being to decide you're worth convincing that ID is correct about biogenesis. Then wait and observe.
You'd think that if a Divine Being gave a damn what we believed about biological history, it would know how to go about convincing us that it's version was preferable.
> and teaching that evolution proves that God does not exist has no bearing in a science class either.
I think you'll find that rare indeed. Not least because the majority of biologists in the USA are Christians. To say nothing of school teachers.
The fact of evolution does refute some of the specific beliefs held by certain religious groups, but not the existence of a god. Nor, for that matter, most of the specific beliefs held by any religious group.
> remember, this country exists because people needed somewhere to go to practice their religion. The freedom to not practice religion was added later.
Actually, about half the colonies that later became the USA were founded as royal colonies for purely merchantilist reasons. The only big religious settlement was Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was founded by the "Pilgrims", i.e. Puritans who were all huffy because they weren't having any luck forcing their brand of religion on their fellows back home. (That changed, temporarily, during the English Civil War, but that started 20 years after the colony was founded.)
> Not quite. Duffbeer703 may be referring to the "dollar hegemony", a global dynamic put in place in or around the end of WWII, which refers to how countries need stockpiles of US dollars in reserve to buy petroleum in an international market. Therefore, and by a wide margin, the main United States export is dollar bills, of BIG denomination.
> As of recently, most countries obeyed this unwritten law: Iraq switched to Euros back in 2001, and the interim US government immediately switched back to dollars. Iran recently began valueing a good portion of its' oil reserves in Euros. Same with Venezuela. OPEC in general has been flirting with the Euro as of late.
I read somewhere, within the past few months, that arms dealers are starting to switch over to the Euro, and the great fear is that drug dealers will follow.
Why the controversy? If you don't like the way somebody wants to play, fork it and do it your own way. And common courtesy says you should rename your fork to distinguish it from the original.
> In general I use linux, but there are many Windows-specific things, several of which he mentions. [...] Family.
You'd be amazed at how much free Windows maintenance you can get out of when you haven't used Windows for many years, and don't know any more about configuring it than your relatives do.
> It's amazing how many day-to-day operations require the inadvertent use of Windows in our daily lives.
That may be true for some people's lifestyle, but not for everyone's. I don't use Windows in my daily life. I don't even have easy access to a Windows system. My only interaction with Windows is every few weeks when I'm in a lab half-way across town for a meeting, and I decide to power up a machine to read Slashdot while waiting for everyone else to show up, or stay after the meeting to play a windows-only game (which I get by without at home, without any problems).
> We are seeing a very socialist-corporate trend developing in the open source world. Projects that were developed by the community for the shared, collective benefit of the community are now getting involved with corporate shenanigans.
Would you mind explaining why the word "socialist" appears in that sentence?
Slashdot Mirror
> You also forgot about acid rain. That was going to destroy all of our plant and animal life within 50 years.
a) Who was predicting that?
b) Are you unaware that we took action when we understood what acid rain is all about?
> And if you don't believe in global warming, you must be a REPUBLICAN!
No, you need only put short-term profits over our long-term well-being. That's not quite a 1.0 correlation with being a Republican.
> So the rate itself is increasing, not just the temperature?
It has only been a few years since we first heard that the Arctic was experiencing an unusual amount of thawing.
And not too many years before that when we heard that Glacier National Park was becoming Glacierless National Park.
Was any of this going on during your childhood?
> Twenty years ago the self-appointed more-intelligent-ones told me I'd freeze to death.
Can you provide a citation on this? I hear it everywhere (except it's usually 30 years ago), but I don't actually remember it from back then.
I do remember the bit about nuclear winter, but no broad consensus that another ice age was imminent, like we've had about global warming for a good while now.
It's an easy way for a company to pwn its employees.
> Who do you think pays for all those lights in Vegas? The losers!
I just send my money straight to the power company, once a month.
> The core spins faster because the bodies of the US founding fathers are spinning in their graves at such high RPM.
Hell, even Ronald Reagan is starting to rotate a bit.
> Given that the Earth's rotation is slowing down, isn't it immediately apparent that the liquid core must spin faster than the outside. It's just basic fluid dynamics. If apply a torque to the outside of a fluid filled region, the middle of that region will feel the effect last.
At noon let's all face west and run five miles real fast, to see if we can get the shell back up to speed.
> I don't see how this could be all that technologically useful for consumers, but for the military
I'm more interested in its effect on my pool game.
Great to see the timely Slashdot article. I need a reminder about these things every nine years or so.
> No, it's clearly intelligent spin.
FYI, Intelligent Spin (notice the capitalization, please!) is just a special case of Intelligent Falling.
Shoulders of giants, kind of thing.
> Anyway, the obvious answer is that you should have a chance to decide whether or not it's a false alarm. In Japan, you probably left your door unlocked and it's just your neighbor moving your laundry out of the rain.
Or your furniture out of the den...
> The house-sitting robot can detect break-ins with it's infrared sensors and then call the owners cell phone and stream video to the tiny screen.
Now you can watch your treasures being cleaned out as it happens, rather than having to wait and rewind the security camera tapes when you get home.
> With no real training in hardware, software programmers really don't know what they are doing, or how to fix something if it goes BOOM.
That's a curious sentiment. If you want expertise in hardware you should be in EE rather than CS. If you only want to understand enough about hardware to understand how your programs are executed, you should get that in a CS program. In fact, that's one of the complaints most often heard from CS students: "Why do I have to take this class when I just want to be a programmer?"
Or if you're talking about learning when and how to change out a power supply, you shouldn't go to college to learn that at all.
And forgive me for lecturing, but any field has some foundations you must digest before you get to the pay-off. It happens that you made the worst of options: went through the most boring part of the apprenticeship and then quit just before you were let in on the tradesman's secrets. I worked through the first two years of a degree in chemistry, and though I learned some things that affect my understanding of how the universe works, I didn't get jack shit as preparation for a career.
> Once I asked him what they did with newly-minted Ph.D.s in CS. He said, "Retrain them." I was surprised by this, and so I asked him if he thought all those years of CS education were essentially useless. "Oh, no," he said. "They're worth their weight in gold. They'd spent years working through extremely abstruse problems, and they'd learned how to absorb massive amounts of information quickly. Basically, they knew how to learn anything. Those guys would know nothing about building actual, production-level software for delivery to a customer. But they'd learn that quickly, because the foundation was strong."
The problem (if it is a problem) with freshly minted PhDs is that as you advance through a graduate program (in any field) you focus on narrower and narrower subject matter as you go, until by the time you write your dissertation you're the world's foremost authority on something so narrow that most people will think your the foremost authority on "nothing".
You also become so familiar with abstruse concepts and the abstruse jargon that they are discussed in, that you may not speak the same language as ordinary people, or even experts in other sub-fields of your discipline.
> A computer programmer is to a computer scientist as a mechanic is to a mechanical engineer.
I would go farther and say -
computer programer : software engineer : computer scientist
mechanic : mechanical engineer : physicist
> I think you'll find the business attitudes of people like Carly Fiorina et al, the dot com boom and bust, and the overhyping of nanotechnology probably had a lot more to do with it. Research needs cash and after the tech crash, 9/11 or any other tipping point existed for the economy, I think you'd find that research just wasn't a dead cert anymore and people pulled out their cash in droves.
I think the will to fund deep R&D faltered long before then. Even the feds aren't interesting in funding much of anything without short term military applications any more.
Sadly, most of our scientists who would have been doing deep R&D thirty years ago now spend all their time writing grant applications so they can maintain a trickle of cash to keep their grad students productive.
> Science and research in teh US is more closely linked to the economy than religion.
It's linked to both, and to a lot of other things as well, but it's hard to deny that Bush's ban on stem cell research and adovcacy for ID is anything other than appeasement for the religious conservatives who helped put him in office.
The castration of environmental science, OTOH, is obviously appeasement for a different group that also helped put him in office.
> As far as evolution versus creationism goes, I've never seen any reason why they can't go hand in hand, although I fail to see how you can take either literally unless you were there...
That's a lame excuse for evolution denial. Or do you think it's never possible to figure out what happened if you didn't see it? If you are home alone with your dog and you hear a lamp fall over behind you and see the dog bolt past you from behind, do you find yourself wishing you had seen it fall so you'd know whether the dog did it?
The arguments "no one was there", "maybe God made the fossils to fool people", and "you can never know anything for sure" are the surest signs that creationism has exhausted every last possibility to provide a theory consistent with the evidence, so that its proponents must now fall back on nihilism, omphalism, and bad theology to support their views.
> There is not consensus on the theory of evolution
I feel confident in calling it a consensus, even though a very tiny number of scientists choose to teach evolution denial to religious audiences. (And even the vast majority of that tiny community don't have credentials in any relevant field - so much so that their followers have developed nasty habits of misrepresenting their credentials.)
> certainly not on the way it is often taught in public schools. No one has demonstrated an ameoba mutating into a human being, infact, nobody has demonstrated anything else mutating into a homo sapiens.
Your ignorance of the evidence for evolution isn't evidence against evolution.
> It seems disingenuous for you to attack ID for being non-falsifiable when to "prove" Evolution you'd need to witness things on an immeasurably long scale of time such that it is "non provable".
So, are you a relativity denier as well?
At least Einstein's theories had testable consequences. ID has no goal other than to "prove" that Someone tinkered with biology somewhere along the way. They aren't interested in any consequences other than the theological; they go out of their way to make excuses for not following up on the implications of their claims.
> The claim of ID proponents is that an intelligent, omniscient designer having a hand/influence in the arrangement of matter to generate life is the most likely of the presented theories.
And they offer nothing to support that view other than logical fallacies applied to misrepresentations of evolution.
Ever wonder why the only way they can get published in a peer reviewed biological journal is to cheat?
> I, for instance, find that much more likely than NaCL turning into protozoa.
And what, precisely, do your intuitions about how the universe works count for? Science has been turning up counterintuitive results since the time of Copernicus.
> You'd suggest that ID is non-falsifiable because you cant conduct experiments to test it. Sure you can. Wait for the divine being to decide you're worth convincing that ID is correct about biogenesis. Then wait and observe.
You'd think that if a Divine Being gave a damn what we believed about biological history, it would know how to go about convincing us that it's version was preferable.
> and teaching that evolution proves that God does not exist has no bearing in a science class either.
I think you'll find that rare indeed. Not least because the majority of biologists in the USA are Christians. To say nothing of school teachers.
The fact of evolution does refute some of the specific beliefs held by certain religious groups, but not the existence of a god. Nor, for that matter, most of the specific beliefs held by any religious group.
> remember, this country exists because people needed somewhere to go to practice their religion. The freedom to not practice religion was added later.
Actually, about half the colonies that later became the USA were founded as royal colonies for purely merchantilist reasons. The only big religious settlement was Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was founded by the "Pilgrims", i.e. Puritans who were all huffy because they weren't having any luck forcing their brand of religion on their fellows back home. (That changed, temporarily, during the English Civil War, but that started 20 years after the colony was founded.)
> Not quite. Duffbeer703 may be referring to the "dollar hegemony", a global dynamic put in place in or around the end of WWII, which refers to how countries need stockpiles of US dollars in reserve to buy petroleum in an international market. Therefore, and by a wide margin, the main United States export is dollar bills, of BIG denomination.
> As of recently, most countries obeyed this unwritten law: Iraq switched to Euros back in 2001, and the interim US government immediately switched back to dollars. Iran recently began valueing a good portion of its' oil reserves in Euros. Same with Venezuela. OPEC in general has been flirting with the Euro as of late.
I read somewhere, within the past few months, that arms dealers are starting to switch over to the Euro, and the great fear is that drug dealers will follow.
Why the controversy? If you don't like the way somebody wants to play, fork it and do it your own way. And common courtesy says you should rename your fork to distinguish it from the original.
> In general I use linux, but there are many Windows-specific things, several of which he mentions. [...] Family.
You'd be amazed at how much free Windows maintenance you can get out of when you haven't used Windows for many years, and don't know any more about configuring it than your relatives do.
> that and the fact that most of my pornos are in
FYI, mplayer plays
> It's amazing how many day-to-day operations require the inadvertent use of Windows in our daily lives.
That may be true for some people's lifestyle, but not for everyone's. I don't use Windows in my daily life. I don't even have easy access to a Windows system. My only interaction with Windows is every few weeks when I'm in a lab half-way across town for a meeting, and I decide to power up a machine to read Slashdot while waiting for everyone else to show up, or stay after the meeting to play a windows-only game (which I get by without at home, without any problems).
> We are seeing a very socialist-corporate trend developing in the open source world. Projects that were developed by the community for the shared, collective benefit of the community are now getting involved with corporate shenanigans.
Would you mind explaining why the word "socialist" appears in that sentence?